Summer Cadence
by Padfoot Reincarnated
Summary: Luna is a Ravenclaw, through and through. And in the end, falling in love with Ginny Weasley is an accident of academia. Luna finds nothing is unendurable. Luna/Ginny femmeslash.


**Femmeslash ahoy! I don't own these characters, but I hope you enjoy my versions of them!**

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It starts when Luna realizes, at seventeen, that she has never been in love.

Oh, there are things—she dreams of hips and breasts and lips, so that's clear enough, and there are girls that make her blush to look at. But there has been no swooping, and no swooning, and most especially no _falling_—which, though she has passed her NEWTs, seems to be a serious material gap in her education.

The Burrow is invisible behind the hill, but every morning Luna looks out and sees Ginny wandering over, half blind, like it's an accident. She always seems surprised when Luna opens the door.

Ginny spends most of the summer after the war curled up in the Lovegood house with bare feet and knees and a smile that doesn't go quite far enough. Afternoons, Luna tucks a blanket around her shoulders and takes her hand and brings her outside, where both of them are happy enough.

"There's nothing _wrong_ with you," Luna tells Ginny.

Ginny stares at the ground and nods, and says she isn't going home. "I can't stand it," she says. "Not without Fred."

So Luna transfigures a pillow into a mattress, and lays it on the ground beside her bed, and falls asleep to Ginny breathing. And sometimes if she wakes to shudders and gasps, her own bed frame shaking with Ginny's silent convulsions, she stays still and says nothing; Ginny would be ashamed to take her comfort—and anyway, maybe it isn't always sorrow when she cries out.

They sit in the garden. Luna takes the chair and Ginny sits in the dirt, leaning up against her calf. Across the way they can see boys flying high above the Burrow, red heads and _Harry_. Ginny watches and bites her lip and frowns. Luna smoothes Ginny's hair and counts the freckles on the back of her right hand.

"I haven't been on a broom since he died," says Ginny. "It's like if I wait for him, he isn't really gone." Ginny absently strokes her hand along Luna's knee, along day old bristles and a few scars from Bellatrix that have never healed. Luna loses track of freckles.

"It doesn't work like that," says Luna. "He isn't coming to you. You have to go to him." She pretends not to notice Ginny's tears. She's gotten very good at doing that.

"Well, I want to get there faster," says Ginny.

But that summer is the slowest of their lives, coming after a year in which they have been equal parts hunted and haunted.

Luna is a Ravenclaw, through and through. She likes books and studying, yes, but it's puzzles she loves, and riddles; and in the end, falling in love with Ginny Weasley is an accident of academia; it's a sonnet with eleven lines that's long since fallen out of iambic pentameter, a bit of Ancient Runic translated in and out of English so many times that she can't tell her own wishes from the truth.

Harry comes to visit, one rainy Tuesday (it's always raining) and Luna disappears to her room and stares at the picture on her ceiling and wishes he wanted to be in it. But though he'd smiled at Luna and said the right things, it's Ginny he wants. Luna tries not to be jealous. It isn't his fault he's a boy; nor Ginny's that she's a girl.

But Harry doesn't come back, and they don't talk about him after that.

They talk about Fred, though. Ginny will smile, and start sentences with, "My brother used to," and end them with, "You'll remember for me, won't you?" And Luna always promises, and she hums while Ginny lists off details of his laugh and smile and gait, and eulogizes the brother she has already buried.

Ginny lets Luna hold her hand, and sometimes she even squeezes back. Luna runs her thumb along Ginny's knuckles, up and down till she's memorized the lines and wrinkles. At night sometimes now, if she hears Ginny crying, she drops her hand down, and sometimes Ginny takes it, and sometimes they sleep that way. Once when it is particularly bad, Ginny crawls into Luna's bed, and into her arms, and Luna holds her through the night. The next morning they don't speak of it.

But it isn't fair, in some ways, because as far as Luna can tell, Ginny is walking away unscathed. For Luna it is beginning to hurt. It isn't unendurable—if she's learned anything over the past year, it's that nothing really is—but it throbs and gnaws, and makes her dull. She thought falling in love would make her feel lighter.

Since Fred's died, Ginny's stopped rolling her eyes at Luna's creatures. She listens, rapt, as Luna describes alphyn and naiades and undines. It's easy enough to pretend the longing on her face is because of something else.

"I don't know why you wouldn't believe in more, after seeing this," Luna says. "It isn't faith. It's logic. And I'd rather believe than not, anyway."

She thinks Ginny is getting better. Ginny goes home some nights, now, and while Luna misses her desperately, it's easier to breathe when she's gone. Luna doesn't feel like she is going to suffocate under the weight of her own wanting, the need to touch.

Ginny laughs more, as August draws on. She looks at ads in the _Prophet_ and says, "Maybe I'll get a job. Move to London with me?" She's only half serious—they've barely graduated, and they're poor, and they're heroes of the sort that belong in quiet country retirement, lest they embarrass those they've saved. Still, Luna says yes to this, and to everything.

They'll never be able to afford Diagon Alley, or any of the other Wizarding districts; real estate, since Voldemort fell, is outrageously expensive. So it'll be Muggle London, if it's anywhere. Ginny has a list of demands three pages long: near the underground, so that she can show off to Mr. Weasley, electricity ("Is that common?" she asks), near a park, a spare bedroom, an ice cream shop on the corner, a fireplace for flooing, and green they can see from the windows, among other things.

Luna imagines waking every day with Ginny on the other side of the wall, and the lovers Ginny might take—men, of course—and the way they would leave their toothbrushes by the sink, and the whole place smelling of Ginny, and Luna knows that she will never, ever be able to live in the apartment they are dreaming of. Ginny is either blind or stupid if she doesn't know what Luna feels by now, and cruel if she does.

"Don't make this complicated," Ginny says, when Luna tells her as much. "You know I care for you, Luna."

"That's not what I mean," says Luna. "And you know that."

Ginny bites her lip and brushes her hair out of her eyes. "I need you."

It's enough, almost.

So they don't get the apartment, and they are still living in Luna's room as if this is normal. Luna doesn't hear Ginny crying in the night anymore, but sometimes she wakes to find Ginny gone. She doesn't look for her, much. Once she looks out her window and sees Ginny out in the garden, in her nightgown, sobbing beneath the hickory tree, and doesn't go to her, no matter how she wants to.

It isn't fair.

Ginny's trying, that's obvious enough. She doesn't touch Luna anymore, even casually, and though she sometimes reaches out to hold Luna's hand, she always pulls back, and blushes as if she's ashamed. She talks about Fred, but she does not ask Luna to take all of the weight. She doesn't flirt, and she doesn't tease, and Luna begins to think there is absolutely nothing she can do to stop falling. It's getting so that she almost enjoys it.

She tells Ginny things that she knows will make her smile. "I don't think souls go to a different world," Luna says. "I think it's over this one, with a little wall between us. It's like they've gone to the next room for a minute. You can still tap on the wall and expect them to hear."

Ginny says, "I wanted to ask Harry. He'd know, wouldn't he? But things aren't right with us."

Luna tries not to be pleased.

Still, Ginny catches Luna staring, over breakfast, and while they are helping with the layout for the Quibbler, and in the attic sorting through old pictures of Luna's mother, and everywhere. She pretends not to notice, for a while, until she can't.

"I thought we were through with this," Ginny says.

Luna says, "I can't be through with it."

Ginny says, "I love you."

Luna stares at her for a moment, shakes her head, and tries to forget.

But that night, Ginny shakes her awake. "Budge over," she says, and because things still seem half like a dream, and Ginny more than half a ghost, Luna does. Ginny crawls in bed beside her, and pulls the covers up to her chin, and Luna aches with the effort of not noticing Ginny's knees knocking hers, and Ginny's feet tangled with her ankles.

"I'm sorry," Ginny says. "I'm sorry."

"It's not really your fault," Luna says. Ginny tucks her head under Luna's chin, and Luna smells the sweetness of her shampoo, and feels Ginny's breath hot on her collarbone. Ginny slides her arms around Luna's waist, and Luna feels Ginny shudder.

"I mean it when I said I loved you," Ginny says, and she stops breathing and moves her head, and the next thing Luna knows they're kissing.

It is exactly as sweet as Luna imagined, if perhaps a little wetter, and a little more hesitant. Ginny is trembling as she moves her lips, and she holds on to Luna as if to steady herself. It's slow, and unsteady, and unsure, until it's not. Ginny rolls on top of Luna, and slides her hand down and up under the hem of Luna's nightshirt.

"Yes," Luna says, because although Ginny hasn't asked, she has never been capable of giving another answer.

So Ginny slides her hand up, and cups Luna's breast, and slides down and kisses her belly button, and meets Luna's eyes in a way that makes Luna remember that she is not the first one that Ginny has touched like this.

"You feel bad for me," Luna says, and Ginny pauses and crawls up beside her. Ginny kisses her neck, and her mouth, and breathes against her cheek. Luna closes her eyes. "This is my first kiss," Luna says. "And it's because you feel sorry for me."

Ginny shakes her head and kisses her again. Luna doesn't kiss her back, and Ginny doesn't deny what Luna's said.

"It's just you've been trying so hard," Ginny says. "I thought I could try a little too."

"You need to leave," Luna says.

Ginny slides out of her bed, and out of her room. But the next morning she is still in the kitchen, and nothing has changed, except now Luna knows the taste of her tongue, and cannot forget it.

That afternoon they sit in the garden. It's raining, but Luna's set up a charm to keep them dry. They watch droplets roll off their skin and clothes, and Ginny watches the ground, and Luna watches Ginny.

"I love you," Ginny says. "And you're my best friend."

"Stop telling me you love me," Luna says, though the words are beautiful spilling over Ginny's lips, and the way she looks when she says them is enough to make Luna forgive her everything.

"I'd do it for you," Ginny says. "If I could. I'm just not built that way."

Luna nods.

Ginny says, "Can I kiss you again anyway? It isn't pity. I promise. It's that I like you, and I liked kissing you."

It's Luna's second kiss, and protecting it surely isn't as important as protecting her first. "Yes," she whispers. She keeps her eyes open when Ginny kisses her, and doesn't close them until Ginny pushes her back into the ground, and kisses her with roots digging into their back and mud rubbing into their skin. Ginny slips a hand between Luna's legs and sighs. The rain is hot.

"It's not so different," Ginny says, when it's over. "How I love you and how you love me. It could work."

"It couldn't," says Luna. And it's true, and she means it, but she kisses Ginny's neck anyway.

It's September, and the rain is hot, and it's terribly unfair.

This seems, in the end, to be terribly unimportant.

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**Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed-I don't know why all of my Luna/Ginny fics seem to end up including a rainy make out scene. Oh well. As always, any and all comments are very much appreciated.**


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